Why Wii?: Adult Gaming in the Public Library

Why Wii?: Adult Gaming in the Public Library
by Brigid Cahalan

If you’re like me, perhaps you started seeing a new word recently—Wifi-- and puzzled over it, then started seeing Wii, and thought somebody must be misspelling something, and what were all these annoying intruders into the lexicon, anyway???

Well, the former is pronounced like hi-fi, is usually hyphenated, and is a type of wireless Internet service. The latter is pronounced like “Wheeeee!,” and I’m sure that interjection has escaped from the mouths of many who tried the Nintendo Wii videogaming products in public libraries or elsewhere. The Wii is a video game console that can be used with a wide variety of software products including Wii Sports, with which one can play virtual tennis, baseball, bowling, golf, and boxing.

When I say “videogaming” do you think teenage boys? If so, think again. According to a report of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, over half of American adults play video games. 23% of survey respondents 65 and older and 40% of those 50-64 report playing video games. Video games include games online and/or with devices such as desktop or laptop computers, game consoles, cell phones, Blackberry, some other handheld organizer or a portable gaming device. Older adult gamers play games more frequently. Over one-third of gamers 65+ play games every day or almost every day. 28% of adults in the study have used a game console such as Xbox , PlayStation or Wii.

A recent article in American Libraries magazine tells us that Old Bridge (NJ) Public Library began Wii gaming with teens around 2006. When staff, especially then-manager of Senior Spaces there, Allan Kleiman, saw how seniors in senior centers and nursing homes were taking to Wii, he thought, “Why not libraries?”. Teens were used as mentors and training instructors; they had to demonstrate their ability to teach adults the technology by training Kleiman and Youth Librarian Theresa Wordelman. After a few months, the older adults became accomplished gamers and started teaching others themselves. They’ve since had multi-screen game events, with simultaneous bowling, Guitar Hero, and Brain Age Academy, and they’ve held tournaments between the teens and their former mentees.

NYPL has jumped into the gaming pool with both feet. March 21, 2008—“Game on @ Your Library” came to Astor Hall (the jumbo vestibule for the Humanities and Social Sciences, aka 42nd Street, Library). The Reason: 18 branches got Wii gaming equipment and lots of software programs, for both in-library use and loan, and a new era had begun. Fast-forward to today—libraries have moved from gaming programs for children and teens to Wii gaming for adults of all ages. The Bronx paper The Riverdale Press recently came to the Bronx Library Center to check out the regular Friday afternoon sessions. My only mini-quibble with the writer is where he tongue-in-cheekedly states adults and seniors come to “stay active, make new friends or simply goof off.” This last “reason” is a stretch. I happen to know that the staff at the Bronx Library Center keep careful track of everyone’s score each week—it’s all there in black-and-white recorded for posterity and while the activity and socializing are certain, I would be surprised to see goofing off in this venue. By the way, I peeked at the scores and they probably average 130 or more.

And not only Bronx Library Center. Not to be outdone, the Francis Martin, Parkchester, Mosholu, and Throgs Neck libraries, all in the Bronx, have been offering free Wii gaming for adults. It’s spreading—check at your local library to see what’s happening there. “Wii” are coming to you, as well. Evelyn Muriel-Cooper at Bronx Library Center and Galina Chernykh at Wakefield are a few librarians who consider it part of their job to travel hither and yon--to senior centers, nursing homes, and who-knows-where-else with the Wii paraphernalia, for the gaming pleasure of all they meet. I am impressed.

I remember going to Scrabble Day in a library once, and being matched up for a game with complete strangers. The novelty of it gave me a wonderful memory that persists, twenty years later.

The American Library Association celebrated the first “http://www.ilovelibraries.org/gaming/” on November 15. All kinds of games—both board and video—were played in libraries throughout the country. Start practicing now and maybe you can be a Wii star this November.

What games do you like to play? Have you ever played a game in a library?

From the NYPL

Gamers Find Social Niche at Libraries

Gamers find social niche at libraries
by Dave Choate

Teens convene for night of fun and camaraderie

In their efforts to bring the community together, some area libraries are reaching out to teenagers through the medium of video games.

A pair of library directors on the Seacoast said their facilities have hosted events for gamers beginning last year. Both cited an opportunity for social interaction between teenagers as one of the idea's biggest draws, as well as increased interest in the libraries themselves.

Portsmouth Public Library Director Mary Ann List said library staff hatched the idea for gatherings centered around video games last year. By the time they were finished, she said close to a dozen teenagers were visiting the library on gaming days to interact with one another and jam out on the popular Guitar Hero video game.

"The very first motivation is trying to keep teens interested in the library," List said. "It's truly recreational and fun for the kids, but there's quite a bit of evidence that there's also learning being done."

List said her library's experiences with gaming has mirrored an interest nationwide, where libraries and other organizations seeking to reach out to teens have considered the use of electronics.

It helps that the Portsmouth Public Library is well positioned to attract teens due to its location next to the Portsmouth Middle School.

List said staff even took its show on the road to bring Guitar Hero over to Gosling Meadows on three separate occasions to play alongside kids there.

Best Buy helped to sponsor the evenings with its gaming equipment after staff there took an interest in the idea, List said.

York Public Library Director Robert Waldman said he considers the use of gaming as a program that fits in with the variety of interests the library plans for.

In addition to getting teens to participate, Waldman said staff members have seen some success in transferring their interest into borrowing books and learning more about the library.

Waldman said he sees value in having varied programming for all age groups, and that video games reach teenagers very well. It also fits in with the library's goal of giving community members space for activities they enjoy.

"We're a community, and we want to help our community," Waldman said.

The nights are hosted by the library and run by Janalee Moquin, a local parent whose 12-year-old son Orion is an avid gamer. She spoke with Waldman about including the after-hours program in the library's media room and has seen an average of more than a dozen interested gamers since the twice-monthly gaming night started up in November 2008.

She agreed with List and Waldman, saying the evenings give gamers a chance to leave home and talk and play games in an open space, thanks to the library. In addition, Moquin said it helps challenge perceptions of gamers as shut-ins.

"Gaming gets a bad rap," she said. "(Our gaming nights) are nice; it's very social."

The gaming nights are meant for kids 12 and up, Moquin said, and pizza and soda are ordered during the 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. sessions.

From Seacoast Online

Where Readers Vent About Bad Books

In Need of Some Amazon Group Therapy
Where Readers Gather to Vent About Bad Books
by Cynthia Crossen

Has this ever happened to you? A book has the critics in full-throttle gush and then wins a big prize and/or becomes a bestseller. So you read it, or start it, anyway. You don't like it, but you know you must be wrong. That makes you hate it even more because it's making you feel like a clod.

It's time for Amazon group therapy, where readers like you gather to vent about bad books. "This was the first book I've ever thrown in the garbage," one reader wrote about Anne Enright's "The Gathering." Another said, "Reading this book was purgatory."


I also didn't like "The Gathering," a novel about a typically dysfunctional Irish-Catholic family (alcoholism, suicide, poverty, blah, blah, blah). But professional critics hyperventilated over it ("fierce and beautiful"; "lyrical and clever"), and it won the 2007 Man Booker Prize.

Some of Amazon's amateur critics, however, had revenge fantasies about it: "I'm trying to think of someone I don't like so I can give this book to them for Christmas," one reader wrote. Another, on Amazon UK, said, "At the book club we even joked about having a ritual burning of it as we disliked it so much." Those words were a comfort to me.

Generally, I don't write about books I didn't enjoy. Why waste your time telling you not to read something? But I've read my share of books that disappointed me, and an astounding (to me) number of them have been darlings of the literary-industrial complex. Sometimes I think it's an elaborate practical joke by critics and judges on us ordinary readers.

Amazon makes it easy for you to find your affinity group, although the positive reviews aren't nearly as much fun to read. On-line critics award from one to five stars (many readers resent that they aren't permitted to give zero -- or even negative -- stars). You can click right to the one-star (or any other star) reviews, and wallow in other people's censure.

I always find people who think I'm right and everyone else is wrong. Their criticism can be succinct and eloquent. About John Banville's "The Sea," another Man Booker winner I couldn't finish, a British reader wrote, "As my own professor used to say, 'This writing has an awful lot of so-whattedness about it.'" Another amateur critic with weaker spelling was more passionate: "OMG This book was so hard to get into. It is the only book I have never finished, and I read probably a book a weak. How do books as boring as this get any kind of awards? Literary Geanius or not, if it does not entertain then I am not into it."

Denis Johnson has often been described as a literary genius, but I turned to Amazon for consolation when I found his prize-winning novel, "Tree of Smoke," unreadable. "Ghastly prose, flat cardboard-cut-out characters and would-be Pynchonian paranoid theories of history that go exactly nowhere," one reader wrote. Another was bitter: "Denis Johnson owes me eight hours of my life I'll never get back."

The classics get raked over, too. "Moby Ick's more like it," one reader said. About "The Great Gatsby," readers have written: "excellent substitute for valium"; "This is a book you should read when there is absolutely nothing else to read. If there is anything else at all, read that instead"; and my favorite, "It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops."

Amazon therapy brought me back from the edge when I was being driven crazy by Alice Sebold's novel, "The Lovely Bones." This was one of the few books I have ever started, hated, thrown away, watched it climb the bestseller lists, picked it up again, hated it again. But everywhere I went, I saw that pale blue cover, and I was tormented by self-doubt. Amazon readers rode to my rescue:

"This book is best summed up as an Afterschool Special -- Teenaged Murder brought to you by Hallmark," one reader wrote. Another was more practical: "On the positive side, it is short, there are no typos, and I didn't pay my own money for it." Finally: "This story is told from the point of view of a dead girl. I wish she had just stayed dead and not bothered to tell us a story."



From the Wall Street Journal

How to Start a Reading Revolution

How to start a reading revolution
I am really excited about my BBC challenge to inspire a genuine love of reading in a Cardiff school
by Michael Rosen

Over the last 10 years, listening to teachers and visiting primary schools, I've seen a slow but steady change in the way books are read – or not read. While "reading" and "literacy" have been made into a top priority, reading books has been sidelined.

In practice, it means that a great deal of energy, money and focus have been put into teaching children how to read, while older children are given excerpts from books to read and then be quizzed about. It's quite possible to find primary schools where older children don't have the experience of reading a whole book, of talking about it in an open-ended way. In such schools, the library may be not much more than a corner in a corridor; visits to the local library may be non-existent; local writers and people who work with the printed word may never visit the school.

There is no requirement from Ofsted or anyone else that these book-loving practices should be in place – there isn't a category on the Ofsted checklist for assessing whether books have an important place in a school or not.

Books are low-tech, portable packages of the widest range of human experience, presented in a format which gives time to grasp complex ideas or to spend time in imaginative worlds. Children who "get" the reading thing have the best possible platform for "getting" the trick of school learning, as well as a resource for the rest of their lives.

This makes the current situation, with "reading" compulsory, but reading books optional, discriminatory. If schools don't make books important then children who come from homes with no books, and who don't visit libraries, will never find their way into this vital way of presenting ideas, feelings and knowledge.

But just how difficult would it be to get schools currently teaching "literacy" to teach a genuine love of reading instead? The BBC challenged me to turn an ordinary school, that was doing all the right things as far as "literacy" was concerned, into a book-loving school in 10 weeks.

You can see how I got on this Sunday on BBC 4. I'll say now that it "wasn't about me". It's about the teachers in the school. If you say to teachers, how can we, with the resources we've got here, develop a policy on reading books, then within minutes, people have ideas, make plans, invent activities. It's as if these wellsprings of teachers' creativity have been held in aspic for the last 15 years.

For me, and I hope the viewer, one of the most exciting things about this BBC project was to see the teachers enjoy the freedom of being able to transform children's lives. I hope Ed Balls and Jim Knight will be watching.


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Note: Michael Rosen is the Children's Laureate in the UK. Visit his website here.
Ofsted is the Office For Standards in EDuctation. You can find more about them here.
Ed Balls is Edward Michael "Ed" Balls, a Labour and Co-operative MP for the West Yorkshire constituency of Normanton and has been the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families since 2007.
Jim Knight is a Labour Party MP who, since 2007, has been the Minister fo State for Schools and Learners in the Department for Children, Schools and Families.